Internship Opportunity at Google Research: I regularly look for research interns (summer or otherwise). The candidates should be very good at developing software and systems. Previous research experience is not required, but a career interest in research, technology and user interface innovation is a must. Send me an email if you or someone you know should be interested.

Welcome to Shumin Zhai's research page

Shumin Zhai is a Human-Computer Interaction research scientist interested in both foundational issues of user interfaces and practical
innovations. He joined Google in Mountain View California in January 2011. Previously he worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose California for 15 years. He originated and led the SHARK/ShapeWriter project that pioneered the touch screen gesture typing paradigm. He is active in the HCI academic community and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on
Computer-Human Interaction. He has been a visiting professor
and lectured at universities in the US, Europe and China. He is a Fellow of the ACM and a Member of the CHI Academy.

FonePal

Eye-tracking augmented user interfaces

The eye, being
simultaneously the mind's window to the world and a world's window to the mind,
has many potential applications in human-computer interaction. Two applications
I have been involved in are MAGIC Pointing (with Ihde
and Morimoto) and iTourist (with P. Qvarfordt). I have argued that whenever possible the eye-gaze should
be used as a contextual and implicit, rather than a direct and explicit
modality of computer input. See an CACM
article on eye-tracking, and my keynote abstract and slides at the
2008 ACM Eye-tracking Research and Applications Symposium.

ScrollPointTM Mouse

A common challenge
to research is the lack of opportunity to make a broad and direct impact on
technologies used by real users. I was fortunate to work with (and lead) a team
of engineers from IBM and IBM vendors (and their vendors) to bring the ScrollPoint mouse from research to market (received a CES
award and millions of users). In addition to the central function, every
“peripheral” factors can also make or break a product, including cost, design
(both deep and surface), packaging and install, and retrofitting its software
to operating systems that are not designed to support new user interfaces. HCI
researchers and practitioners with broad skills are uniquely suited to drive a
user experience centered system engineering process in product
development. For example, in order to balance between cost and quality, a deep
user experience and human performance understanding can be applied to decisions
on sensor quality, processor speed, A/D conversion resolution, and the shape
and form appeal of a mouse. I hope one day to find the time to write “The tale
of a mouse”.

6 DOF input control

Researchers
sometimes wonder whether academic research is really useful to the larger
world. This project on multiple degrees of freedom input control was rather
academic and abstract when it was done (advised by P. Milgram and B. Buxton at
the University of Toronto), but it has found surprising amount of practical (and
academic) applications. Researchers, engineers, designers and industry
executives personally tell me how they use the concepts, understanding, and
methods developed in this research project in their design, development, and
research of new 6DOF controllers. Key contributions of this research include
the taxonomy of controller resistance (isometric, elastic, and
isotonic), the relationship between transfer function and controller property
(e.g. rate control's compatibility with self-centering devices), the effect of
different muscle groups in 6DOF manipulation, effective evaluation tasks (6DOF
docking and 6DOF tracking), and methods of quantifying coordination in multiple
degrees of freedom input control. The
work was driven by the need of designing telerobotics and virtual reality
interfaces, but the recent wild success of the Nintendo Wii has liberated
multiple DOF controllers from these specialized fields to ordinary households.
Read more on manipulation and navigation in 3D
interfaces.